I recently attended a two day workshop in San Francisco.  Here are Notes from Cap Intro West

Art of Capital Raising

David Kim from Apex partners is a sharp West Point Harvard B school graduate that does IR for a $40 billion private equity shop. They tend to have sovereign wealth and institutional funds. Apex says investors expect high returns, plus 20% annualized. He didn’t say whether they got them or not but he did say the investors have a 10 yr. lock up.
Joseph Marrent KStone Partners low volatility credit funds, The difference between good guys and great guys is that the great guys can hedge, know how to short. It’s mildly reassuring that Sax Angle Partner’s short selling winning ratio was over 56%,, even exceeding our long winning ratio last quarter.
Christopher Ainsworth MD US Trust subsidiary of Bank of America manages a ton of money, largest trust company in the US he said with $200 billion in client assets. Very HNW clients over $100 million. They look at overall investment strategy not the only provider so what is the client’s overall balance sheet look like. He seemed worried by the Trump administration and sweeping nationalism taking hold. Have to change now. He is worried because people seem unfazed.

Mark Sullivan- Stonehaven Investors in hedge funds look for large returns, looking for minimum 10% returns. It’s more like 1.5% and 20%.

Keynote speaker Future of the Energy Sector John Tozzi best idea of all things is Tesla. He also thinks if Devon, EOG and SLB don’t work, nothing works.

Chris Stanton Sunrise Capital Partners says they were up 3x S&P last year, quant shop big rise in interest rates coming, stress with China. Does Trump lift sanctions on Russia which will help Russia. said the reason the markets went down in the first part of last year was everyone was worried about a China slowdown. The reasoning he said China slowed down was that the U.S. started clamping financial penalties on Russia and that’s their largest trading partner. When the arm is ailing the rest of the body hurts or something like that. It never ceases to amaze me how people can get up and state erroneous facts with the most authoritative and convincing manner. I fact checked him and Russia is the #9 trading partner with China on Wikipedia, dwarfed by both the US and EU, #2, and #1 respectively. I should have called him out but I emailed him instead. Arrogance and ignorance is a lethal combination.. I wouldn’t believe anything he says, particularly the one about being up 3X the S&P.

Paul Marino moderator Lawyer Alternative, absolute alpha looking for absolute returns, about 10,000 funds now about 829 started, 695 closed. Probably more funds closed than started probably last year. Conflicting info but there is great churn regardless.

Keynote Prosper. Ron Suber new administration wants government to get out of the student loan business so there are lots of new online student lenders.  Goodbye subsidized student loans?